Wednesday, November 7, 2007

It's getting hot in here!

So, for those of you who don't know yet, I work at an elementary school as a teacher's aid in an ESE class of 12 K5-1st grade kids. Needless to say, something interesting, if not funny, happens just about every day. Just ask Fred & Andy, who have to listen to me at dinner every night...

Well, last week on Halloween day (of course!) our class was having music time around 8:45am. There is one student who has a hard time sitting still and participating. So we have come to the conclusion that food helps calm him. He was not doing well with music, so I proceeded to make some popcorn in the microwave for him. As I sat back and watched the kids in music, the volunteer that comes in on Wednesdays to help out said "what's that smell?" I said "oh, it's just popcorn". That's when we turned and saw smoke coming out of the microwave! So I jumped up and opened to see there was a bag of doritoes up in flames! (see, to keep ants away, we keep our snacks in the microwave, I didn't notice the doritoes in there) so the Speech teacher (who was in the room with us) and the music teacher marched the kids out of the room before they even knew what happened. In the mean time, the volunteer is opening windows, I am getting cups of water (yeah, I realized later I poured 3 cups of water into an electrical appliance), and the fire went out... Luckily, our class had been invited to another room for a presentation, so the room had time to air out. The fluky thing is that the fire alarm is directly above the microwave and it didn't go off!! I believe it was God having mercy on me. I truly believe that if I had been the one responsible for evacuating 700+ people out of the school, I would have had to quit on the spot...Well, what I have learned 2 things from this:1-ALWAYS look inside the microwave BEFORE starting it.2- for an impromptu fire drill, our kids did great!